ISSN 2397-9127 PRINCIPIUM The Newsletter of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies Issue 14 | August 2016 ■ Guest Introduction by Paul Gilster ■ News from the Initiative ■ Cosmos: A Personal Voyage ■ The BIS Daedalus Model - the last lap R O ■ The Starship Engineer Course 2015 F E V ■ Interstellar Studies at the ISU 2016 I T A I T I N I S T U D I E S www.i4is.org Scientia ad sidera Knowledge to the stars Principium | Issue 14 | August 2016 1 account in this issue is no more than a taste of what was delivered in Strasbourg. Editorial Last November the i4is delivered a two-day Starship Welcome to Principium 14, our quarterly Engineer course at BIS HQ in London. Kelvin Long newsletter about all things interstellar. Our Guest and Rob Swinney give us an outline of its content. Introduction this time is by Paul Gilster of the This is the first of a series of technical courses at invaluable Centauri Dreams blog and the Tau Zero several levels which i4is is planning. Foundation. He muses on the relations between The front cover illustration this time is a "blueprint" Science Fiction, space advocacy, exoplanets, SETI of the thermonuclear Orion spacecraft as envisaged and increasingly well funded projects for interstellar for the Cosmos series. probes. Paul is one of our foremost "rational For our rear cover we have an image we spotted on dreamers" and we look forward to more Centauri Paul Gilster's Centauri Dreams website. No obvious Dreams. His thoughts will always be very keenly interstellar connection but the beauty of the image welcomed in Principium. bowled us over! Interstellar News this time reports on the Andromeda Look out for the latest issue of our academic probe project. We report from Charterhouse, the education journal, Axiom, out soon, and for annual British Interplanetary Society (BIS) Space opportunities to help us achieve our interstellar Conference with i4is contributors and the unveiling goals, Working towards the real Final Frontier, of Terry Regan's Daedalus model, soon to appear in towards the end of this issue. You don't have to be a the BIS headquarters. Two of our regular and highly rocket scientist! valued artists have been honoured by the BIS and by a pair of influential SF organisations. Adrian Mann Comments on i4is and all matters interstellar are was honoured with the BIS Patrick Moore medal. always welcome. Write to me! David Hardy gave the principal address at the joint John I Davies, Editor, Principium AGM of the British Science Fiction Association [email protected] and the Science Fiction Foundation; we report from Imperial College. BIS and i4is will be contributing PS Look out for the STOP PRESS at the end of to science television in Japan, we report from BIS the account of Starship Engineer 2015 announcing HQ. Starship Engineer 2016 - Weekend of 12-13 November, BIS London. This is a revised and We have more schools outreach happening updated version of the course with a more work- in London. We'd love to help the interstellar friendly timing. Contact [email protected] for more community to inspire the rising generation UK-wide, details. across Europe and worldwide. Please get in touch via contacts, at the end of this editorial. Kelvin Long, Executive Director of i4is, is a long established collector of space art and memorabilia. Keep in touch! He remembers, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the Join in the conversation by following the pioneering television series by Carl Sagan and shows i4is on our Facebook page www.facebook. us some of the original art work for the series which com/InterstellarInstitute he has acquired from the original artist. Become part of our professional net- work on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/ Terry Regan completes a saga of detailed model groups/4640147 making stretching over several years in The BIS And take a look at the i4is blog, The Star- Daedalus Model - the last lap. More pictures of ship Log www.i4is.org/the-starship-log how it was done and an engrossing account of the Follow us on Twitter at @I4Interstellar mishaps and triumphs on the way to his completion And seek out our followers too! and it's unveiling. Contact us on email via [email protected]. Back issues of Principium, from number The i4is two-week elective for masters students one, can be found at www.i4is.org/Publica- at the International Space University is reported tions#Principium in Interstellar Studies at the ISU. This was a very substantial piece of work by i4is people and The views of our writers are their own. We aim associates from industry and academe and the for sound science, but not editorial orthodoxy. Principium | Issue 14 | August 2016 2 Shaping the Interstellar Imagination INTRODUCTION Writing and editing Centauri Dreams over imagination soar because of what they imply the years, I’ve talked to numerous scientists and about our future. engineers in universities, space agencies and the commercial sector. They’re my primary sources Long Journey to Earth 2.0 and they often take the time to answer questions While we dream of places like Pandora, and write for the site. But I’m always struck by Avatar’s utterly unlikely setting (gas giants the number of non-technical people who weigh in around Centauri A and B have been ruled to discuss the prospects of reaching another star. out), or imagine evocative worlds like Robert Curiosity among the public is rampant, and we Silverberg’s Majipoor, we’re also hoping to in the interstellar community need to nurture it. close the circle by detecting a real Earth-like Fortunately, a number of trends are converging world. that make this easier. About 1,200 light years from Earth in the Let’s start with science fiction, because the direction of the constellation Lyra, Kepler- field has proven enormously productive in 62f is a world with a radius 40 percent larger enlisting new enthusiasts no matter what their than Earth’s, which puts it below the 1.6 RE backgrounds. Science fiction writer and critic demarcation line that is increasingly thought to Adam Roberts, whose recent novel The Thing define the difference between Earth-like worlds Itself (Gollancz, 2015) is a new and richly and planets that are more like Neptune. Thus developed take on the Fermi paradox, likes to talk we’re probably looking at a rocky planet here. about science fiction as a genre that keeps alive It’s also a planet that orbits its K-class primary our facility for what he calls ‘imaginative play,’ at a distance that could place it in the outer something that we’re pretty good at as kids and regions of the habitable zone (as defined by the tend to lose all too quickly among the pressures of possibility of liquid water on the surface). adult jobs, families and other responsibilities. New work on this world examines the A. Gilster Paul Imaginative play is something I try to engage in planet’s atmosphere to consider scenarios everyday. As does the interstellar community, that could produce habitability. A team led which is in the interesting position of straddling by Aomawa Shields (UCLA), working with the line between science fiction and science Rory Barnes, Eric Agol, Benjamin Charnay, fact. We talk about concepts that have yet to be Cecilia Bitz and Victoria Meadows (all at confirmed and discuss possibilities of engineering the University of Washington) modelled that are well beyond what is currently attainable. climate possibilities using several different People who hear about some of these notions methods — the Community Climate System through movies like Interstellar or Avatar take Model and the Laboratoire de Météorologie note when they realize that there are serious Dynamique Generic Model. Informing the people who think there are genuinely possible climate modelling was the use of another futures that involve star-flight. computer model called HNBody, which was used to analyze and adjust the planet’s orbital So let’s talk about what we are doing to engage parameters. Out of all this, we get this from the imagination in fiction and in fact. Much of this Shields: is happening through the ongoing development of space missions. We can thank William Borucki “We found there are multiple atmospheric (NASA Ames), principal investigator for NASA's compositions that allow [Kepler62f] to be Kepler mission, for his herculean efforts at getting warm enough to have surface liquid water. the stupendously successful exoplanet hunting This makes it a strong candidate for a space telescope to fly. And among thousands of habitable planet.” confirmed exoplanets that are the result of this, we’re beginning to find a few worlds that let the Principium | Issue 14 | August 2016 3 Habitability is a thorny issue, obliquity — the angle between exoplanet populations statistically, and all too often we look the planet’s rotational axis and we’re now about to start deeper into the composition and its orbit. The Earth’s obliquity is populating the local neighborhood characteristics of distant worlds 23 percent. An axial tilt of 60° around M -dwarfs, K -dwarfs and only to find that the likelihood or higher, coupled with summer G -class stars much like the Sun. of liquid water on their surface solstice at a given hemisphere is slim. In many cases the planet occurring at the planet’s closest Couple this with the James Webb may not be a rocky terrestrial approach to its star, could Space Telescope, which is on world at all. But Kepler62f passes produce this effect, allowing track for a 2018 launch, and we most of our tests and remains a surface conditions that were at can begin drilling down to smaller seriously intriguing candidate, least periodically habitable.